Global Communications Group (GCG) Blog

Joel St. Germain, president and CEO of Global Communications Group, Inc. (GCG) along with Heidi Humphreys, Operations Manager and Chris Newell, Senior Consultant, attended Intelisys’ Channel Connect 2013 event at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, CA. The annual 3-day event kicked off on Wednesday, October 9th and ran through October 11th.

At Friday evening’s awards ceremony, GCG was honored with several awards including: Overall Revenue Growth in 2013, Platinum Club TCP Partner, and for being an outstanding partner to Intelisys.

GCG has been an Intelisys telecom agent since 2003 and part of Club TPC since its inception, earning various awards at the different achievement levels every year since 2006. This is the second year in a row that GCG has achieved Platinum Club TCP Partner status by exceeding $1 Million per month in billings.

Last year Intelisys declared August 9th as “GCG Day” in honor of achieving Club TPC Platinum Level.

Today the GCG team and Intelisys celebrated the 1st annual anniversary of GCG Day with lunch and a champagne toast!

Last year Intelisys declared August 9th as GCG Day when we reached Intelisys Club TPC Platinum Level - exceeding $1M in monthly billings as of August, 2012.

“We have built a tremendous partnership with Intelisys, and we look forward to continued growth for years to come,” said Joel St. Germain, Founder and CEO of GCG. “No one else in the industry comes close to their top-level support, so we owe much of our success to Intelisys.”

GCG has been an Intelisys telecom agent since 2003 and part of Club TPC since its inception, earning various awards at the different achievement levels. GCG is the second company to achieve Platinum status, following Tricia Ward from Netsource Group who reached it in 2011.

Back in 1988 while people were flocking to their doctor’s offices to get a prescription of the new drug, Prozac, AT&T and a consortium of other companies where busy making history building a $335 Million fiber-optical transatlantic telecommunications cable called the TAT-8.

The TAT-8 was a 3,148-mile long cable that linked the USA to England and France, initially carrying 40,000 telephone circuits that allowed simultaneous calls between the three countries. Although it was not the first transatlantic cable, it was the very first cable to use revolutionary optical fibers - thus making telecommunication history!

Although this state-of-the-art cable contained two working pairs of fiber optical fibers, the TAT-8 was not problem-free by any means in its early stages. One of the main issues was the fact that the cable was laid on the continental shelf making it vulnerable to snags from commercial fisherman’s trawling nets. In addition, sharks liked to attack the high voltage cable during feeding frenzies leading to several shark deaths and numerous, prolonged outages, thus prompting the invention of a “shark shield.”

The TAT-8 was eventually retired from service in 2002 and was followed by the PTAT-1, built just one year later in 1989 at the cost of $400 Million US dollars. The PTAT-1 transatlantic cable was privately funded, but maintained by C&W and Sprint/PSI.

Today, fiber-optic cable is still the lifeline for many business voice and internet services including: Optical Carrier (OC3) Internet service, Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM), and both Voice T1 and T3 lines. For more information about these and other fiber-optic cable services, call us today at 877-708-8900.

Just in time for Shark Week! Ever wonder what a shark biting a cable might look like? Watch the video below!

Just when you thought the government was trying to reduce its portfolio of data centers, news came out last month that indicated otherwise. According to an article on Nextgov, the amount of data centers managed by the U.S. Federal Government has in fact doubled since 2011.

You might be asking yourself, “how is this possible?” Well, the answer is simple; the substantial increase from approximately 3,000 to 6,000 data centers is due to a government policy shift that drastically changed how the government defines and takes count of data centers for inventory purposes. So in essence, there really hasn’t been much of a change in the actual amount of government data centers, just a change in how they are inventoried.

So what’s the scoop on the policy change? According to Nextgov, prior to October 2011, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defined a data center as a 500+ square foot dedicated space for computer servers and other equipment. However, now that definition has changed to include smaller spaces such as server rooms and closets. In December of 2011, the count increased by 1000 - going from 2,100 data centers to 3,100. Now with the new definition change, that number has risen to around 6,000.

Since 2010, the government has made efforts to consolidate and reduce the number of centers to try and make computing cheaper and more effective. However, since that initiative was set, the government has only shut down less than 400 data centers.

Overall, the government probably isn’t going to meet its goal to save between $3 billion and $5 billion by shifting to more efficient, virtualized data centers by 2015. There were also hopes to save an additional $5 billion annually by shifting to cloud computing, but saving might increase over time as more efficiency initiatives take effect.